Forbidden Fruit : Counterfactuals and International Relations

by Lebow, Richard Ned

• ISBN13: 9781400835126
• ISBN10: 1400835127
• Copyright: 2010-02-18
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

Could World War I have been averted if Franz Ferdinand and his wife hadn't been murdered by Serbian nationalists in 1914? What if Ronald Reagan had been killed by Hinckley's bullet? Would the Cold War have ended as it did? InForbidden Fruit, Richard Ned Lebow develops protocols for conducting robust counterfactual thought experiments and uses them to probe the causes and contingency of transformative international developments like World War I and the end of the Cold War. He uses experiments, surveys, and a short story to explore why policymakers, historians, and international relations scholars are so resistant to the contingency and indeterminism inherent in open-ended, nonlinear systems. Most controversially, Lebow argues that the difference between counterfactual and so-called factual arguments is misleading, as both can be evidence-rich and logically persuasive. A must-read for social scientists,Forbidden Fruitalso examines the binary between fact and fiction and the use of counterfactuals in fictional works like Philip Roth'sThe Plot Against Americato understand complex causation and its implications for who we are and what we think makes the social world work.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Making Sense of the World	p. 3
Counterfactual Thought Experiments	p. 29
Franz Ferdinand Found Alive: World War I Unnecessary	p. 69
Leadership and the End of the Cold War: Did It Have to End This Way?	p. 103
Scholars and Causation 1	p. 137
Scholars and Causation 2	p. 166
Appendix
Experiment 4, Instrument 1: Unmaking American Tragedies	p. 196
If Mozart Had Died at Your Age: Psycho-logic versus Statistical Inference	p. 205
Heil to the Chief: Sinclair Lewis, Philip Roth, and Fascism	p. 222
Conclusions	p. 259
Notes	p. 287
Index	p. 329
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